OnFinality - High Performance Public Infrastructure (Q3 2021)

You can read more details about this proposal, including detailed traffic and costings here

Original Motivation

Over the last 3 months (July, August, September 2021) we've provided a scalable free public API service so that everyone can access public pools of managed Polkadot and Westend nodes. This provides the following three outcomes:

• Grow the ecosystem by reducing the barriers to entry to access a high performance nodes
• Help scale existing projects in the ecosystem by providing infrastructure  services that can be depended on
• Assist with the testing of all networks by providing valuable data back to the community on how validator nodes are running and scaling as the network traffic increases (we've made Github issues based on behaviour we've observed)

Service Details

Between 2021-07-01 and 2021-09-30 our Polkadot API service has:

• Served an unprecedented total of 5,506,995,252 (5.5 billion) requests
• Accumulated almost 17 TB of data egress
• The highest daily total was 87,529,840 requests in a single 24 hour period
• Our rolling 7 day average at the end of this period was over 70 million requests each day.
• Westend had over 96 million API requests in the period
• All time totals for Kusama is 11,181,846,891 (11 Billion) since November

Note: We have implemented custom middleware in our platform that counts and logs these requests, you can view the raw data here.

Enhancements

Additionally, we are proud to have delivered some key service enhancements (on our own cost) that benefit the Polkadot ecosystem in the last quarter. This includes:

• An improved dashboard for our partners so that they can monitor usage and manage the upgrades of the nodes in real time.
• Collection of a rich set of metrics and usage data that is securely shared with partners to help them scale and develop their network.
• Improvements to our routing strategies and scale enhancements to our load balancer with the goal of scaling to a Billion daily requests.
• A variety of improvements to our health metric collection tools and automated recovery scripts to ensure our 99.9% SLA is met.
• Scale improvements to our team, processes, and systems to allow us to provide this same service to every parachain team at launch

You can always see live data on our API service on our public status page.

We continue to reaffirm our dedication to providing free support of 500,000 requests to our API service each day for users around the world. You can access our public API service by connecting to it using Polkadot.js or via the endpoints listed below. You can also create your own free API key in our application and track metrics and statistics.

• https://polkadot.api.onfinality.io/public
• wss://polkadot.api.onfinality.io/public-ws
• https://westend.api.onfinality.io/public
• wss://westend.api.onfinality.io/public-ws

You can read more details about this proposal, including detailed traffic and costings here